Harry Patch, who died in July aged 111, truly was, as Peter Parker's title indicates, The Last Veteran – at his death in a care home in his native Somerset he was the only man left to have fought in the trenches. Harry's war ended in September 1917 during the Battle of Passchendaele, when a shell exploded over the stretcher he was carrying, killing three of his mates and wounding Harry in the groin.

Since Harry was an ordinary man – a plumber who never moved far from his West Country roots and whose longevity was his sole claim to his late celebrity – Parker's chronicle of his life is necessarily woven in with a wider meditation on the war, its ending